Can Reform become the party of the working class?

There is now no doubt that Nigel Farage has parked the Reform UK tanks on Labour’s front garden, and we can all see it. In recent months, Farage has supported steel workers in Scunthorpe and visited the Silverhill Colliery, a historic mine site in Nottinghamshire. This week, Reform committed to reinstating winter fuel payments and scrapping the two-child benefit cap. After last year’s General Election, the view in Westminster was that Reform threatened the Conservatives from the right. But could it also be a threat to Labour from the left?

Reform – a party that had no MPs until last year – is setting the political agenda. At least in rhetoric, Reform is saying a lot that the working-class, ‘Red Wall’ voter wants to hear. It is no longer solely fixated on immigration. Instead, it has started to talk about ideas such as family, community, welfare and industry. Well aware of his growing support among the working class, Farage has even challenged UK prime minister Keir Starmer to a debate at a working men’s club in a Red Wall seat, although I doubt Starmer would even know what a working men’s club is.

The prime minister looks increasingly like a deer caught in the headlights. This has led to the incredible spectacle of Labour, stunned by Reform’s success at the local council elections and its victory in the Runcorn by-election in early May, trying to mimic Farage’s talking points. In a speech on immigration, Starmer said that the UK risked becoming an ‘island of strangers’ . He has also boasted about the number of failed asylum seekers Labour has deported since coming to power. Now, Starmer is even considering reversing his position on the two-child benefit cap. Of course, this too has emerged only since Farage’s vocal opposition to the two-child limit. Yet Starmer is still failing to hit home with the Red Wall voters he knows he needs to please.

Many liberals continue to believe that Reform voters are brain-dead racists. The Guardian recently described the party’s success as ‘ominous’. But the truth is very different. Reform voters are the people who I live among in Nottinghamshire, which was one of the councils won by Reform in May. Many people who vote Reform have not been politically engaged throughout their lives, but have warmed to Farage’s commonsense programme.

Labour, who came to power 11 months ago wanting to seem ‘tough’ with the country’s finances, has languished in the polls. In fact, it is hard to imagine a more unpopular government among the working class since the Thatcher-led Conservatives in the 1980s. The poor standing of Starmer among working-class Britons is further proof that Labour is now the party of middle-class liberals and bourgeois city-dwellers. It is supported by people who know that a vote for Labour won’t hurt their position, but might nonetheless ease their guilt about the tsunami of inequalities that has flooded Britain in recent decades.

The left, including Labour, overplayed its hand when it spent years describing Farage and his supporters as ‘far right’ and ‘racist’. To the working-class people across the country who I speak to as a researcher, Labour is no longer listened to. In contrast, Farage, who recently said that family, community and country ‘are the three things that matter above everything else’, seems relevant. That is because the people of the UK want a welfare state and a society that are there to help them, and they don’t care who delivers that, even if it’s Farage.

Starmer is now in a very difficult position. Wiley Farage and his army of supposedly thick gammon are outfoxing the human-rights lawyer and the civil-service wonks in Whitehall. Will Starmer continue to ape Farage and Reform’s policies? Who knows. But if he does, it would take Labour far closer to its working-class roots than the party is right now.

Lisa McKenzie is a working-class academic.